Cybersurf

Why did I choose evolution as a subject for a web site review program? Simply because there are so many good sites online arguing the issue from different perspectives. While there are many nuanced versions of each side of the argument, they can be broadly divided into two camps. Those who believe in evolution and those who don’t – that is the creationists. I am going to try really hard, not to reveal my position on the debate – the aim here is to share some ideas on where you can get information on the discussion.

Let’s start with the talkorigins.org web site. Although it is a web site, it is also a usenet newsgroup devoted to the discussion and debate of biological and physical origins. As the site says on the front page itself – and I quote: “Most discussions in the newsgroup centre on the creation/evolution controversy but other topics of discussion include the origin of life, geology, biology, catastrophism, cosmology and theology.” end of quote.

What is really useful about the talkorigins site is that real scientists provide answers to questions normally raised in the creation vs evolution debate.

Talkorigins.org is an excellent site if you are looking for good ammunition in plain easy to understand English.

On the other side of the debate, there is creationdesign.org and this too provides a wealth of ammunition if you are on the creationist side of the fence.

The front page has a beautiful photograph of a galaxy with the words Creation Ex Nihilo covering the centre. I presume it means that the galaxy was created out of nothing.

Down both sides of the front page are basic, yet provocative navigations bars carrying titles such as: Circuits; the Honey Bee, If you believe….; Chances and sixth sense; parade of impossibles and quotations:

All of this out to prove that evolution is impossible therefore a divine creator must have made all this.

Creationdesign dot org is certainly not a boring site.

Then if you go to the debatingChristianity.com web site you will find a whole host of interesting debates – and one of the most visited is of course the creationism versus evolution section.

One of the most interesting sites I found while researching this debate is called the Panda’s Thumb dot org. I will read out how the site describes itself:

The Panda's Thumb is the virtual pub of the University of Ediacara. The patrons gather to discuss evolutionary theory, critique the claims of the anti-evolution movement, defend the integrity of both science and science education, and share good conversation.

A virtual Pub – who would have guessed? But it is Australia.

And as we draw to the end of this week’s Cybersurf, let me remind you that I will post on the Cybersurf Blog – which you can find at Cybersurf.blogspot.com – a list of all the web sites mentioned in this program. I will also put up a few additional web addresses for those who wish to read further, and for those who want to add their voices to the debate – there is a comments section just waiting for you. Remember – Cybersurf.blogspot.com

And tomorrow in the weekly science slot, we’ll take a look at evolution in our schools. Should evolution be taught in schools – listen to the science feature on AM Live Tuesday Morning. Till next time, remember to keeeeeep on surfing.

Relevant Links:

Talk Origins
Debating Christianity and Religion
Creation Design
Where will the science vs. religion debate go next? - SciDev.net
Panda's Thumb
Teaching evolution in schools "not a priority" - Science in Africa
Origin of Species and Evolution - Wits University

// posted by Steven Lang @ 7:44 am 1 comments

The Highway Hospice Association is a non-profit organisation aiming to raise one million rand to help the terminally ill. A group of perfectly ordinary – but highly energetic South African women got together and decided to climb Mount Kilamanjaro to raise the money.

And if you still missed it, don’t worry, I will post this entire script on the cybersurf blog.

The actual page for donations was created by Alison Bailey, one of the climbers, and it is quite interesting in that you can see a list of donors – who donated, and how much! The list does not say where the donors reside, but judging from the list, and from the fact that the donations are in US dollars, my gues is that a fair amount of the money comes form the USA.

The climb will take place in August and we will post photographs on SABCnews.com.

And now for a rapid change of tack – this time into education….

I needed to do some research into the school curriculum – so I went directly to the Gauteng department of education site. It is pretty good – the front page is fast and has conventional navigation – a horizontal bar just below the main banner and a dynamic nav bar down the left hand side.

Better still – all the navigation links worked just fine. The site can, however, be improved by putting some consistency into the pages – what I mean is that some buttons will take you to very nicely designed html pages, while others such as the page on school terms – gives you very useful information – but you lose all the navigation and beautiful design elements of the front page – and still other buttons take you to incredibly long, arcane pdf documents – it’s a bit of a mix and match.

I was very impressed with the school finder function which was very fast. You can search by region; by suburb; by school name or by type of school. It took me less than a minute to find all the contact details of my daughter’s primary school.

Overall – to the GDE - congratualtions for a useful site – by the way, I did find what I was looking for in the first place.

It then ocurred to me that I should look at the national education department’s web site. Time constraints don’t allow me to go into detail – but I found the national site to be pretty decent, and it had links to all the provincial sites. Some of them are good – too many think that a picture of the local MEC is the most important thing on a web site – guess what – they’re wrong!

And for some reason - the link to the Mpumulanga department of education did not work.

And as we rush to the end of this program, let me remind you that I will be putting up all the relevant links to sites mentioned in the last three minutes on to the cybersurf blog – which is strategically located at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com and I’ll repeat that for tactical purposes – Cybersurf.blogspot.com

Thanks for listening and remember to keeeeeep on surfin….

Relevant Links:

• The Highway Hospice Association
• National Department of Education
• Gauteng Department of Education
• Gauteng Online

// posted by Steven Lang @ 3:39 pm 0 comments

Last week I attended the mobility 2005 conference. It was organised by the World Wide Worx, a local company that specialises in internet and mobile research.

Last week’s conference was described as the culimation of a year long research project on the current and future share pf mobile and wireless technologies in South Africa.

I asked Arthur Goldstuck, the MD of world wide worx, about the highlights of the research:

Arthur:

Probably, the most significant findings relate firstly to the size of the market, which we’ve argued for some time now is overstated by about 20 percent. So rather than having 23 million cellphone users in South Africa, we probably have eighteen-and-a-half million cellphone users, although there are around 23 million active contracts in South Africa – that’s not the same as individuals using cellphones.

The other very signficant aspect is how extensively large corporates in South Africa rely on mobile technologies and what impact it has on their businesses.

And by contrast to that, how little use is made by small enterprises, small and medium enterprises of mobile and wireless technologies – but where they do make use of them, we find that the same high level of impact on their efficiency and on their ability to do business.

Steven

Some of the actual research was done by Peter Searll of a company called Plus 94 – and they found that in spite of the great success of mobile phones in South Africa, there is some confusion about new technologies.

There is quite a big uptake on the using cameras on phones but for GPRS it’s very small; for 3 G very, very small and there’s a lot of confusion – people don’t know how to use it.

Have you ever tried to download anyting that requires WAP? I mean, I consider myself fairly technologically literate, and I struggled a lot of the time to do so.

So the applications and real useage of hese applications is not really so widespread.

Steven:
Peter Searll is a director of 94 Plus.

While everyone agrees that cellphones have been far more popular than even the most optimistic shareholders had hoped for ten years ago – the take up of the internet has been a little disappointing. After all, there are about six times as many cellphone users as internet users.

I asked Arthur Goldstuck if he could explain this.

Arthur:

There’s a simple answer for that! It’s cost, and that cost is related both to the basic cost of accessing the internet – the additional fee one has to pay every montyh simply to have access to that channel before you ever have even started using it. And the things you do on the Internet once you have that access are expensive too.

In terms of telephone access time, local calls charges arfe thei highest they have ever been, and that’s a major facto in holding back growth of Internet. Broadband is hugely expensive in South Africa.

So even though that’s an incentive for people to go online more often, the expensive of broadband is still holding back the growth of internet in general.

Steven:

That was Arthur Goldstuck, a well known author of books on technolgy and also managing director world wide worx. You can find the web site at www.theworx.biz – that is worx with an “x” and dot biz with a zed. So one more timewww.theworx.biz

That’s it for this fine Monday morning, thanks for joining me and till next week, remember to keeeep on surfing.

// posted by Steven Lang @ 8:52 am 0 comments

This week Telkom announced substantial reductions in the pricing structure of their ADSL packages. ADSL is a type of technology that allows your regular phone line to give you broadband, always-on access to the internet. Personally I have the Home DSL 384 package and the price of will drop from R449 to R359 per month – much cheaper, of course, but still quite expensive if you consider that you still have to pay the ISP and additional R200 per month.

I am not sure if the price cut applies to existing subscribers or only to new customers.

It also appears that Telkom is having difficulty keeping up with the demand for ADSL – I have heard that people are having to wait for weeks for their installation.

Besides that, we have no indication if the increased take-up of ADSL means that more people are going to share existing bandwidth. It is all to do with contention ratios – and Telkom refuses to tell us about their contention ratios.

For a rapid change of tack, let’s get down and dirty – yes, let’s talk pornography.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has approved a domain name for pornographic sites. This means that instead of having porn sites ending in dot com, or dot co dot za – they will be encouraged to take up sites ending in ….. wait for it…. Dot ex ex ex. – triple ex for porn – sounds quite logical to me.

But of course this move has raised its own set of controversies. The freedom of speech people say – you can’t force pornographers to change addresses – they will end up being put into a triple ex ghettoes – and they argue that pornography – by providing consistently viable business models has made the internet what it is.

Personally, I believe it’s a good thing – the dedicated domain name – not pornography because it will make it much easier to filter out porn sites – all you do is put on a filter that blocks out all ex ex ex domain names, and you won’t end up seeing all those dirty pictures by mistake.

Essentially, if you want porn, you’ll know where to find it, on the other hand if you don’t want it. You’ll know where not to go.

This last week was also notable for yet more virus news – the so called Bagle virus proliferates, and I have received several e-mails complaining about virses sent in apparently legitimate e-mails from banks. We have said this before on Cybersurf – do not open attachments unless you are very sure that they are clean. The rule with attachments is simple:

When in doubt, throw it out.

You absolutely must have anti-virus software on your machine – and do not go for the freeware. If you pay for good anti-virus protection and make sure it is updated daily; it could be one of the best investments of your online career.

This will not guarantee immunity but it will certainly help.

There has also been a whole host of e-mails in circulation claiming to have news about the capture of Osama Bin Laden. This is a hoax – do not open it.

If he has been captured I can assure you, you will hear about it on Safm – not from a viral hoax.

That is all we have time for today, if you would like to take a peek at the script for this program, please click along to the Cybersurf blog which you can find at cybersurf.blogspot.com – if you missed it – cybersurf.blogspot.com.

Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week, same time, same place for more Cybersurf

// posted by Steven Lang @ 5:09 pm 5 comments